Author: Tim Graczewski
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The Chairman: John J. McCloy & The Making of the American Establishment (1992) by Kai Bird
They don’t make them like John J. McCloy any more, influential men who serve presidents of both parties on issues of enormous national importance. Kai Bird tells McCloy’s amazing life story in this lengthy single volume biography first published in 1992. McCloy came from rather humble beginnings. His insurance executive father died when he was…
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The Glorious Revolution (2008) by Edward Vallance
I love to read popular histories by authors such as David McCullough, Candice Millard, Stacy Schiff and Roger Crowley. I was hoping that the “The Glorious Revolution” would be cut from the same mold. I was persuaded by the back cover of the paperback edition, which claims the book is, “A thrilling narrative account of…
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The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (1997) by Clayton Christensen
One of the most influential business books of all-time, Clay Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma” is a must-read for anyone interested in business strategy. The author’s paradoxical conclusion is that what is often perceived as good management practice – listen to and faithfully serve your current customer base – actually exacerbates the problems associated with dealing…
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The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (1982) by Robert Caro
The first in a monumental five volume series on the 36th president of the United States, “The Path to Power” takes nearly 800 pages to cover just the first 32 years of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s life. Often times biographers lose their sense of objectivity about their subject and end up writing a glowing hagiography. Such…
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Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1990) by Robert Caro
Volume II of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” takes place over just seven years, from 1941 to 1948, the interregnum between Johnson’s two US senate races. It marks perhaps the lowest ebb in Johnson’s political fortunes, a period of deep and lasting personal malaise. Volume I, “The Path to Power,” introduces Johnson as a man…
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Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2002) by Robert Caro
The third volume in Robert Caro’s monumental “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” “Master of the Senate” focuses in on Johnson’s storied tenure in the Senate from 1949 to 1960. Overall, Caro is less critical of Johnson than in previous volumes. He writes in awe of Johnson’s improbably fast and remarkably high ascent within the cloistered…
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Halleck: Lincoln’s Chief of Staff (1962) by Stephen E. Ambrose
Henry Halleck is probably the most consequential Civil War general that you’ve never heard of. In this slender 1962 biography by famed historian Stephen Ambrose, Halleck emerges from the shadows to take his rightful place in the pantheon of Union war generals. Halleck graduated third in his West Point class of 1839 and was immediately…
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Upton and the Army (1964) by Stephen E. Ambrose
I first read “Upton and the Army” in the mid-1990s when I worked in national security and defense circles. The US military was wrestling with the implications of a new “Revolution in Military Affairs,” a dramatic and discontinuous change in military capabilities wrought by the Information Age. In the post Cold War environment, serious military…
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Witness (1952) by Whittaker Chambers
“Witness,” Whittaker Chambers’s classic autobiography, was first published in 1952 in the midst of the Red Scare known as McCarthyism. It dropped like a fifty-gallon drum of gasoline onto a bonfire. Chambers was a former Communist operative turned state’s witness. He was raised in a fractured family living in near poverty on Long Island. After…
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